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Is it possible to...

Is it possible to install Unix on a slave hard drive that is partitioned? Would Unix be recognized when I boot up, or what would happen? I don't want to connect my two hard drives on the same IDE cable because of speed reasons. Thanks in advance!

Re: Is it possible to...

Originally posted here by skilar Is it possible to install Unix on a slave hard drive that is partitioned? Would Unix be recognized when I boot up, or what would happen? I don't want to connect my two hard drives on the same IDE cable because of speed reasons. Thanks in advance!

It seems like you confused some stuff. I assume you are using EIDE (ATA) disks, and your mobo has two IDE conenctors (channels), so you can add up to 4 devices.

You ask to install to a slave drive cause you don't want to connect two hard drives on the same cable? Well either you have a cd-rom or something else as master, on the second cable or otherwise you are doing strange things. If you only have one disk on master 0, and you add a new disk, you either put it on slave 0, you do not not want that, so, you put it on channel 1, why choose the slave? Most logical is to put it on master 1.

I doubt your speed idea makes sense... your main hard drive should always be set as the first Master, and SHOULD NOT have a slow IDE device on the same cable for instance a CD-ROM or an older slow HDD. So putting your new drive on another cable only makes sense when there's no slow IDE device on that cable.

So you either put both (fast) IDE hdd's on the same calbe making them Master and Slave, or choose for maximum performance for your system disk and put that one on a cable on IDE 0 Master and other two devices on IDE 1 master and slave.

To answer your question, yes you can put *nix on a slave device with partitions, make sure the partitions are non-dos and it should work. Even if they are dos, most *nix come with a Fdisk look alike (even better)

Ok, I did mess some stuff up, but I have a good reason for it.
On the master cable I've got a DVD+/- drive and a regular DVD drive. I guess my dad must've been confused when I asked if the hard drives were on the same cable, because he said no, but now that I look, they are on the same cable. Thanks for the help!